I don’t know if any of you managed to see any or all four of the episodes of the BBC’s ‘The Nativity’ this week. It did get a very good press overall – except, I saw, on the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science website, where it seems, sadly, from reading the members’ comments there, to have thoroughly spoilt a number of atheist or anti-theist Christmases this year.
Tony Jordan, of Eastenders, Hustle, and Life on Mars fame, who wrote the mini-series, says that he was so fascinated by the story of the Nativity that he spent some two years writing his dramatic presentation of it. He wanted to show, he said, how seemingly ordinary people might have reacted to the extraordinary and miraculous events that befell them -those events that are recorded in the gospel infancy narratives – the accounts of Jesus’ birth.
The story he presents is told from a very human perspective, but he takes seriously the original narratives themselves: he recognises that the gospel writers approach the fact of the incarnation from different points of view and with different audiences and priorities in mind; and so there is a blending of the gospel story in order to give a broader and deeper picture of the incarnation – one of the main reasons why the Church chose to accept not just one but four ‘Gospels’ to be included in our New Testament.
The mini-series is very powerful, both visually and verbally – more so, of course, than any crib scene or talk from a clergyman could ever be! And so, if you havn’t yet seen it yet, I do thoroughly recommend it to you.
Most interestingly, Tony Jordan actually has a stab – a very good stab in fact – at answering the question ‘Why?’ Why did God, in one of his forms of being God, choose to become one of us? Like all good and helpful theology (talking about God and us in relation to him) the question is put and answered simply (i.e. straightforwardly) and in terms that ordinary people can understand.
In one brief but very important scene, Peter Capaldi and Jack Shepherd, who play Balthazar and Melchior, two of the three ‘Magi’, are discussing on their way to Bethlehem the significance of the event – God sending his son - and why God might consider this necessary. Melchior asks Balthazar how he views God. Does he see him as a presence, an intellect? And did God just create the world and then move on, or did he stay and watch over his creation?
Balthazar replies that the days of God’s intervention seem to have long gone; that whilst Jewish history tells stories of God’s intervention as he tries to get them to understand and obey his life-giving and life-enhancing laws, that was all in the past. But then Melchior suggests that the Jewish idea of God as Father is actually hugely significant, and that such an intervention is both natural and logical. He asks Balthazar, ‘But isn’t that how you would deal with a child? - the Father’s nurture and constant presence teaching them to make their way in the world, making rules, so that when the time comes he can let them go? Just because the Father no longer intervenes does not mean he is no longer there.’ And then he adds, ‘What if the child appears to have lost its way; to have forgotten the things he was taught? ‘The Father would intervene’, replies Balthazar. ‘
Wouldn’t you?’ says Melchior.
And you know, I cannot think of a simpler, more logical reason for the incarnation and explanation of it. Yes of course it is a huge mystery - how God by the operation of the Holy Spirit is able to so combine with Mary that he, and not some new person – as would be the case were Joseph involved – is able to be born in human form. But the orthodox Christian understanding of the incarnation remains by far the most logical and fair reading of the evidence available to us – which must include the testimony and ministry of Jesus himself, and of course his resurrection as the cornerstone of our belief about who Jesus was. It also is in perfect harmony with the belief that God is love.
It is from the fact of the incarnation and the biblical record – the old testament and the new - that we may
believe with confidence the answers we have been given by God to those two great questions Richard Dawkins says are fundamental to our understanding of life and our place in it and yet remain still so elusive to biologists. ‘How did life begin’, and ‘What is consciousness?’
Sadly, somehow I think that the first chapter of St. John’s Gospel and Tony Jordan’s, ‘The Nativity’ are unlikely to be on Richard Dawkins’ reading and viewing lists this Christmas. But if you make them yours, I am quite sure that the God whose birth as a human-being we remember and celebrate tonight, will bless you with insight and understanding about who he is, about who you are, and about the kind of person he calls you to be through faith in his son.
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